Saturday, March 2, 2013

3/2/13: Ciao, America!

My friend and I like thrift stores. We like them so much, in fact, we've made it ritual to visit them when we meet. Invariably, Things Happen when we visit these thrift stores.

Namely, things tend to repeat themselves.

Take, for instance, my friend's February 4th visit. We first went to a Goodwill store, in which we both noticed a book for sale: Ciao, America! Why did we notice it? There's no saying, but it stood out enough, for each of us, to have recorded it mentally.

Then, an hour later, we hit another Goodwill, located some twenty miles away. Interestingly, this one also had the book Ciao, America! My friend and I, both attuned to these recurrences, both noted the book being there also. We got a laugh from it.

But then, a month later, it happened again.

This time, it occurred some hundreds of miles away, in North Carolina's Outer Banks. It was my friend's next sequential meeting, and so we'd undertaken our usual sweep of the area's thrift stores, starting with a non-Goodwill. Well, it had the book, Ciao, America!

Three in a row. We laughed more.

Then it happened a fourth time.

Another Goodwill, now. We went there immediately after leaving the day's first thrift store, some miles away -- and it had the book. We marveled at it. Four in a row, a month and hundreds of miles apart.

Still, neither of us bought it. The book just didn't appeal to us.

(Note: it bears mentioning that Ciao, America! was only one of several recurring items between these and other thrift-store visits, to uncanny levels. If it was just Goodwills, I would say they got a stock of certain items and distributed them. But it's not just Goodwills ...)